This seems to provide more context (no pun intended) for the code snippet you showed:
for my $word (@{ $self->{keywords} }) {
my $word_score = 0;
$word_score += 1 + ($content =~ tr/ / /) if $content =~ /\b\Q$
+word\E\b/i;
$matches{$word} = $word_score;
}
That seems to be iterating over the list of keywords, and calculating a score per keyword.
It might be that the same could be accomplished with greater efficiency if the algorithm were turned onto the words in $content rather than the keywords, and then determine if each word in $content matches a keyword from the hash. If so, then apply the tr/// count.